…his stepson Herman in Swabia, and his son Henry in Bavaria).

Control of the southern duchies allows Conrad to continue the process begun under the Ottonian dynasty of centralizing authority over the Empire in the hands of the Emperor at the expense of the regional dukes.

Conrad breaks with Ottonian tradition, however, in favoring a more strict means of controlling rebellious vassals.

Whereas the Ottonians follow a policy of informal public submission and subsequent reconciliation, Conrad uses treason trials to declare rebels as "public enemies" to legitimize his subsequent harsh treatment as he had done with Ernest II of Swabia and Adalbero.

The use of these treason trials though is seen by the nobles not as a mere shifting a power in favor of the Emperor but as a cruel breach of German tradition.

Henry convenes a Council of Princes at Ulm, here receiving his first recognition from Italy.

Rudolf is supported by the Archbishops of Mainz, Salzburg and Magdeburg as well as by the Dukes of Carinthia and Bavaria, the Saxon rebel Otto of Nordheim and possibly also by Duke Magnus of Saxony.

He proceeds to Mainz, where on May 25 he is crowned by Archbishop Siegfried I, but soon after is forced to flee to Saxony, when the Mainz citizenry revolts.

This presents a problem, since the Saxon duchy is cut off from his Swabian homelands by the king's Salian territory.

Moreover the pope avoids to take sides and adopted a waiting attitude.

Rudolf is accused of greed, treason and usurpation by Henry's liensmen, while his own support crumbles.

Rudolf gives Swabia to his son Berthold and attempts to rectify his situation by stalking Henry's forces near Würzburg, but to little effect.

Meanwhile, he is deprived of Swabia by the Hoftag diet at Ulm in May, and the king gives the duchy to Frederick, the son of Frederick von Büren, Count in the Riesgau and Swabian Count Palatine, with Hildegard of Egisheim-Dagsburg, a niece of Pope Leo IX, or a daughter of the Ezzonid Duke Otto II of Swabia.

Frederick is the first Hohenstaufen ruler.

Henry Suso, author of an influential book of meditations, had shared in the exile of the Dominican community from Constance between 1339 and 1346, during the most heated years of the quarrel between Pope John XXII and the Holy Roman Emperor.

He is transferred to the monastery at Ulm in about 1348, where he seems to have remained for the rest of his life.

Early in his life, Henry Suso had subjected himself to extreme forms of mortifications; later on he reported that God told him they were unnecessary.

During this period, Suso devised for himself several painful devices.

Some of these were: an undergarment studded with a hundred and fifty brass nails, a very uncomfortable door to sleep on, and a cross with thirty protruding needles and nails under his body as he slept.

In the autobiographical text in which he reports these, however, he ultimately concludes that they are unnecessary distractions from the love of God.

Suso and Johannes Tauler were students of Meister Eckhart, forming the nucleus of the Rhineland school of mysticism.

Suso's first work was the Büchlein der Wahrheit (Little Book of Truth) written between 1328 and 1334 in Constance.

This was a short defense of the teaching of Meister Eckhart, who had been tried for heresy and condemned in 1328-9.

In 1330 this treatise and another (possibly the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom) had been denounced as heretical by Dominican opponents, leading Suso to travel to the Dominican General Chapter held at Maastricht in 1330 to defend himself.

Suso's next book, Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom), written around 1328-1330, is less speculative and more practical.

At some point between 1334 and 1337 Suso had translated this work into Latin, but in doing so added considerably to its contents, and made of it an almost entirely new book, which he called the Horologium Sapientiae (Clock of Wisdom).

This book is dedicated to the new Dominican Master General, Hugh of Vaucemain, who appears to have been a supporter of his.

Suso will be very widely read in the later Middle Ages.

There are 232 extant manuscripts of the Middle High German Little Book of Eternal Wisdom.

The Latin Clock of Wisdom was even more popular: over four hundred manuscripts in Latin, and over two hundred manuscripts in various medieval translations (it was translated into eight languages, including Dutch, French, Italian, Swedish, Czech, and English).

Many early printings survive as well.

The Clock was therefore second only to the Imitation of Christ in popularity among spiritual writings of the later Middle Ages.

Among his readers and admirers were Thomas à Kempis and John Fisher.

Hans Multscher is active from 1427 in Ulm, where he executes the realistic stone statues of kings and pages on the outside of the Rathaus (Town Hall), completed in 1430.

In 1429, he sculpts the powerful stone statue of Christ on the west portal of Ulm Cathedral.

His wooden sculptures, equally numerous as his works in stone, include several gracious statues of the Virgin and Child.

Silesian reformer Caspar Schwenkfeld voluntarily exiles himself from Liegnitz in 1529 in order to relieve pressure on and embarrassment of his duke, living from 1529–1534 in Strasbourg, where his highly personal religious teachings had begun to alienate Martin Bucer, and then in Swabia.

Martin Luther had expelled Caspar Schwenckfeld from Silesia in 1540.

Schwenckfeld publishes the Great Confession on the Glory of Christ in 1541.

Many consider the writing to be heretical.

He teaches that Christ had two natures, divine and human, but that he became progressively more divine.

He also publishes a number of works about interpreting the Scriptures during the 1550s, often responding to the rebuttals of the Lutheran Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus.

The Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther’s publication of The Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, has divided Western Christendom; the reformers continue to argue among themselves over dogma.

Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, a German theologian, writer, and preacher who is one of the earliest promoters of the Protestant Reformation in Silesia, has his own views on the sacraments—the Heavenly Flesh doctrine–developed in close association with his humanist colleague, Valentin Crautwald.

Schwenckfeld’s highly personal religious teachings, already alienated from those of Luther over the eucharistic controversy of 1524, have also alienated Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer.

Finally settling in Ulm, Schwenkfeld in 1541 defends his beliefs in the Great Confession on the Glory of Christ, emphasizing the differences between the positions of Luther and the late Huldreich Zwingli, especially with regard to the Eucharist, and arguing that since the nature of man is sinful, Christ's human nature must of itself be divine.

Orthodox theologians regard this latter belief as a Christological heresy.

Schwenkfeld's books are banned, and his followers, the Schwenkfeldians, or Confessors of the Glory of Christ, are persecuted.

The Protestant Union, facing the superiority of the League army of thirty thousand men confronting the Union's army of ten thousand, agrees on July 3, 1620, under the terms of the Treaty of Ulm, to cease all hostilities between both parties during the war in Austria and Bohemia and cease its support of Frederick V.

Without the risk of an attack, the League can use all its military forces to support the emperor.

The army is in the same month relocated to Upper Austria.

Napoleon’s new Grand Army sweeps through Germany towards Austria, defeating General Karl Mack’s Austrian army at Ulm on October 20.

Mack reorganizes his army on October 12 into four corps under Schwarzenberg, Werneck, Jellačić, and Feldmarschall-Leutnant Riesch.

The units are organized similar to the French corps, except that Mack constantly shuffles the component units.

On this day, Mack issues a flurry of orders, each set countermanding the previous instructions.

In sum, he orders Jellačić to march south to the Tyrol, Schwarzenberg to hold Ulm, and Werneck to move north to Heidenheim an der Brenz followed by General-Major Johann Ludwig Alexius von Loudon's division of Riesch's corps.

This is followed by a council of war at which Mack decides to send Riesch along the Danube to destroy all the bridges.

In one speculative account, the real reason Mack sent Jellačić to the Tyrol was to get rid of Mayer, who led a brigade.

Historian Frederick Kagan will surmise that Mack was either confused or he deliberately scattered his army to give it a better chance to escape.

In any case, Mack soon issues a new set of orders that are similar to the last set.